Dear Diary: Horizons

• Coheed and Cambria — Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow
• Vitamin C drink (elkos vivede)
• Angry, dispirited

You’re angry because you’re trying not to smoke too much. You’re trying not to smoke too much because you were in Cologne over the weekend and you smoked nearly a hundred cigarettes in three days. Thirty a day might not be much to some people, but it was to you. Monday was a frog-in-throat, fire-in-chest hellscape, unhelped by the lack of sleep and two day hangover from so many Nordrhein-Westfalen beers, lack of sleep because you were sharing a bed in a hotel room with your buddy Maik and he snored like a hog, and because you never sleep, obviously, unless you’re drunk, which you were, of course, that’s what you do at Fasching.

You’re not meant to call it Fasching. That’s what they call it in other places in the Cologne-Bonne Region, but not in Cologne itself. There, they call it Carnival, as a couple of Cologners told you outside Blue Shell. (Note: a place for you to play with your band.) You thought you were going to get sick the day after the party at Blue Shell: it was so cold outside, but you had to go out often because in your skisuit costume it was swelteringly hot inside. Hence, why you ended up smoking so many cigarettes on the first night, a habit which extended in night two and day three.

In bed that first night, Maic snoring like an ape next to you in the shared double bed of the small hotel room you managed to find cheaper than any of the Airbnbs that were still available when you booked back in December, you thought of the girl behind the bar who you fancied a little. Nothing serious, of course — you have a girlfriend, after all — but she was very lovely. She gave you tap water for free, which supposedly she wasn’t allowed to do (company policy) and you know she didn’t do it for everyone because after you thanked her and gave her the side eye while you finished said water, she make another punter pay. Then you got some water from her again later and she was equally as lovely. You thought about if you had been single, and lived in Cologne, and what it would have been like to ask her out on a date — every conceivable possibility, from the meanest of nos to the swooniest of yeses, how you would have asked her for coffee because she works in a bar and probably doesn’t want to see a bar again after work. Then you thought of your girlfriend and felt guilty, even though you hadn’t really done anything wrong. Eventually, after an age and a sneaked cigarette out the hotel window, you fell asleep.

The second day was nearly as eventful as the first. Honestly, if you’d been single, you would have done very well in Cologne, very well indeed. As it happens, you weren’t, so that was that — and anyway, as one Maic’s particularly handsome buddies put it to you while you were on your way home, Döner in hand, your current girlfriend was extremely hot as it was. You replied that her personality wasn’t so bad, neither.

An odd juxtaposition of opposing feelings: loving your partner; still finding yourself attracted to other people; feeling guilty despite not having, really, done anything wrong. Even if you agreed that feeling #2 was wrong in a relationship (which you didn’t), you couldn’t control your thoughts. They just came, as you so often liked to say, like flies from the darkness of your subconscious. So what was there to feel guilty about? The knowledge that you would make someone else feel bad if they knew, you supposed, even though there’s no reason for them to ever know. Perhaps you just have a guilty conscience, or a wandering eye. But who doesn’t?

Maybe there are those without wandering eyes. Regardless, you’ve been really listening the shit out of Coheed and Cambria lately. On the train on the way to Cologne you listened to no less than four of their albums, plus assorted songs from two others and quite a few repeats. Hit and miss wouldn’t be the right term, but inconsistent: some albums exceptionally good, others for all intents and purposes perfect records, and others entirely forgettable, badly produced, boringly written. Some, as you learned on the journey home as you listened to the remaining three albums you didn’t know, excellently produced and written but just not your thing. Others, more your thing, but not played or produced well enough to really excite you. But some songs — oh, boy, some songs.

Sometimes people laugh at you for listening to the same artist, album, song, even, over and over again, but you can’t help it. It’s how you learn lyrics off by heart, how you learn about song structures, about riffs and genres, how you get to feel a song in your heart, if you can be so bold. As a child, there was only a limited selection of albums to choose from — a large selection, indeed, but not endless, like today’s selection. Perhaps due to this you don’t have a problem relistening to songs and albums, because you’ve done it for so many years. Or maybe when you find something you like, you want to listen to it until you don’t like it any more. That’s what usually happens.

Currently you’re listening to lots of math-, prog-, and post-rock. Stuff you need a degree to understand and a doctorate to write. But it’s what you’re into, it’s your current phase. You always go through phases. In a week, or a few, or a month or two, you’ll be in a different phase — you’ll only want to listen to soul, maybe, or reggae, or jazz, or classical, or neosoul. Who knows what the next phase will be? Not knowing was the excitement, the beauty. The next band was always a surprise, and always a nice one. Which set of three to five (usually it was three to five) geniuses were going to fall into your lap, from the sky, from the algorithm, from a Wikipedia rabbit hole, during this phase of the music cycle? This phase, it was prog rock, something inspiring you to write in stupid time signatures and forgo choruses and typical structure, to jump from 6/4 to 4/4 to 7/4 and back again unapologetically. And if you had the balls, you’d finally rewrite that song you composed in 5/4 back when you were fifteen and present it to the band in the hope they liked it. If you had the stones.